Frontiers of Innovation
Conference Recordings: Recordings will be available exclusively to ILP members. To learn more about becoming a member, click here.
Engage with MIT’s innovation ecosystem at the 2026 MIT Korea Conference, exploring the next frontiers in science, technology, and business transformation.
This year’s program features Professors Mark Bathe, Juejun Hu, Steven Spear, Kevin Chen, and Anu Agarwal, highlighting breakthroughs in:
Ten MIT-connected deep tech startups will present lightning pitches showcasing cutting-edge innovations across AI systems, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, sustainable chemistry, autonomous vehicles, and smart infrastructure.
Attendees will have opportunities to engage in in-depth discussions with MIT faculty and startups through interactive sessions, a networking lunch, and a dedicated networking break. The 2026 event will spotlight emerging technologies shaping the next decade and strengthen collaboration between MIT and Korea’s research and innovation ecosystems.
Registration Fee - General Public: ₩750,000 - ILP Member: Complimentary with membership
The registration is only for IN-PERSON participants.
English-Korean Simultaneous Translation Service available.
All dates/times listed below are Korea Standard Time (GMT +9). The agenda below is subject to change without prior notice.
President of LG Sciencepark Chairman of LG Group Technology Council
Suehyun Chung is the head of LG Sciencepark and is responsible for developing both short-term and long-term technology strategies for LG Group. He governs the technologies across LG's subsidiaries, ranging from electronics and chemicals to life sciences.
From 2021 to 2024, he was responsible for the $6 billion consumer business at LG Uplus, which consists of mobile, internet, and IPTV. He led the corporate marketing, sales, business strategy, customer services, CX innovation, and home services.
And from 2020 to 2021, he was responsible for the $5B global sales and business strategy of mobile business at LG Electronics. He led the sales organization throughout the world.
He received an MBA from the Wharton School of UPenn and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Dr. Srinivasan is a distinguished scientist who received her PhD in Microbiology from The Ohio State University in 2004, where she contributed to the discovery of the 22nd amino acid, Pyrrolysine (2002). She first came to MIT as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Tom Rajbhandary’s lab, where her research focused on understanding protein synthesis mechanisms in Archaea.
Dr. Srinivasan subsequently moved into the business development and technology licensing space, serving in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, where she helped commercialize technologies in medical devices and alternative energies. She then moved to UMass Medical School’s Office of Technology Management in 2009 and to Emory University in Atlanta in 2014 as the Director of Public and Private Partnerships for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. In 2019, Dr. Srinivasan joined Emory’s Office of Corporate Relations as Executive Director, and in 2021, she led the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations.
Professor, MIT Department of Biological Engineering Professor, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Mark Bathe is a Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, a Member of the Harvard Medical School Initiative for RNA Medicine, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. He obtained his Doctoral Degree at MIT, working in the Departments of Biological, Chemical, and Mechanical Engineering before moving to the University of Munich for his postdoctoral research. He returned to MIT in 2009 to join the faculty in the Department of Biological Engineering, where he runs an interdisciplinary research group focused on engineering nucleic acids for the targeted delivery of therapeutics and vaccines, phenotypic profiling of neuronal circuits, and quantum information science and technology. He is an academic co-founder of Cache DNA and Kano Therapeutics, and in his free time, he enjoys running, biking, and swimming, amongst other outdoor activities.
Nucleic acids are conventionally known as molecular carriers of genetic information, the blueprint for life. Alternatively, nucleic acids can be used to fabricate complex 2D and 3D molecular assemblies with unprecedented nanometer-scale precision that replicates, and goes beyond, highly evolved naturally biological assemblies. In this talk, I will illustrate how we have used DNA-based virus-like particles (DVLPs) to elicit a potent immunological response that surpasses a clinical protein-based equivalent VLP due to the inert, immunologically silent nature of DNA. I will discuss how this next-generation DVLP platform opens up numerous possibilities in active immunotherapies for challenging infectious diseases as well as central nervous system disorders. Next, I will demonstrate how programmable DNA sequences can be used to encode complex “wet” databases of information, akin to a Google Books search engine for molecules. I will apply this database system to storing human and viral genomes at room temperature, bypassing the need for cold-chain logistics that currently limit global genomics to a very small fraction of the globe and global population. Finally, I will illustrate how lithographic semiconductor patterning can be used to interface organics with inorganics by using DNA to pattern single quantum emitters with nanometer-scale precision on chip-scale silicon wafers for quantum applications. I will highlight translational stories from these areas as our inventions at MIT transform into industrial innovations through start-ups cofounded by Bathe and lab members to impact the US and global economies.
Executive Director, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Senior Director, MIT Horizon
Kathleen has spent her career at the forefront of technology and innovation. Her current pursuits revolve around AI education, digital transformation, sustainable fashion and strategic organizational design in an AI driven world.
In her role as Executive Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Kathleen collaborates with a multidisciplinary research team on Supermind Design—a methodology for generating innovative ways to organize people and technology. She applies this expertise at MIT Open Learning, where she leads MIT Horizon, a learning platform that enables organizations to scale their training in AI and other emerging technologies.
Kathleen is active in the innovation world. She is a venture partner at Good Growth Capital, a fund dedicated to supporting ambitious technology founders. Prior to that she played a pivotal role in successfully launching The Engine—a fund aimed at providing patient capital to tough tech ventures.
Throughout her career, she has led global businesses across five continents. Roles include President, Technology Review; President, MIT Enterprise Forum; and co-founder and board member, Hubweek.
Kathleen frequently speaks at global conferences, serves on the Eisenhower Fellowships selection committees, and mentors for MIT DesignX. Her work has earned her significant recognition, including being named to the Folio: 40 list of media industry leaders and one of Boston's Most Influential Women by the Women of the Harvard Club.
By bringing together MIT’s digital learning portfolio and embedding AI-driven capabilities, MIT Learn is a platform for continuous, adaptive, and lifelong learning for the world.
Head of Business Development and Operations, Foundation EGI
Harshit Gupta is Head of Business Development and Operations at Foundation EGI, where he drives growth and strategic partnerships. He brings 15+ years of experience in designing innovative products and scaling businesses. Before joining Foundation EGI, he was Head of Business Development at Mercari US, where he launched multiple new business verticals and revenue streams. Harshit has held several key roles at Samsung, most notably leading Global Business Development for AI services and advising top executives on strategic initiatives across products and geographies. He began his career at Apple as a hardware engineer, designing and setting up manufacturing processes for the inaugural iPhone and iPad lines. Harshit holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS from Stanford University, and a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur.
Co-founder and CTO, LineLab
Scott Nill is the CTO and co-founder of LineLab. He has more than a decade of experience in advanced manufacturing and production system development. His work spanning aerospace, biopharma and biomanufacturing, green technologies, and consumer products, among other verticals, seeks to bridge engineering, operations, and finance to scale innovative products. He holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Operations from MIT.
Co-founder and COO, Black Mesa
Ed Chung, M.D. is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Black Mesa, a Boston-area startup building AI-enabled tools to transform QA processes, automate data extraction from paper records, and improve sponsor-manufacturer relationships in biomanufacturing. He has degrees in biology and chemical engineering from MIT and an M.D. from the Duke University School of Medicine. His career path has taken him through roles in clinical leadership, the healthcare C-suite, and technology startups. In addition to his work at Black Mesa, Dr. Chung remains active as a pediatric hospitalist and is also a medical officer for the MA-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team.
Co-founder and CEO, Advanced Silicon Group
Marcie Black’s passion is in solving important problems in the world including equitable health care, energy and the environment, and energy security. She is the CEO at Advanced Silicon Group (ASG). ASG is commercializing a silicon photoelectric sensor (Light Sense) which will lower the barriers of protein sensing so that everyone has access to good health care. Prior to founding ASG, Marcie was the President and co-founder of Bandgap Engineering, which focused on lowering the cost of solar electricity through black silicon solar cells. Marcie also was a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) working on a variety of nanotechnology and optical systems. She began at LANL as a prestigious Director’s Funded Post Doc, developing organic and nano solar cells. Marcie has a Ph.D. from MIT in Electrical Engineering, under the supervision of Institute Professor, Mildred Dresselhaus. Prior to her Ph.D. work, Marcie was a device engineer at Motorola. In 2009, she was awarded an R&D 100 award for her contributions to work at LANL. Marcie also was honored as one of the ten “Women-to-Watch in 2010” by Mass High Tech. Marcie has over 30+ papers and more than 20 issued patents with many more pending.
Co-Founder and CEO, AtoMe
Alex O’Brien is co-founder and CEO of AtoMe. He earned a Ph.D. in nuclear science and engineering from MIT, where he advanced research in extreme-environment metallurgy and additive manufacturing for applications in nuclear fusion and aerospace. Alex is passionate about overcoming the limitations of today’s metals, believing that the materials advancements we unlock today will define the boundaries of our technological leaps tomorrow. At AtoMe, he now leads the mission of pushing those boundaries to their extreme, developing next-generation metals reinforced by nano-materials to achieve the durability and reliability required to make additive manufacturing feasible in critical industries.
Founder and CEO, Bay Compute
Ken Sullivan is the CEO and Co-founder of Bay Compute, an AI company dedicated to solving one of the most urgent challenges in technology today: the rising power, energy, and environmental demands of modern data centers. Bay Compute’s intelligent operating system unifies power, cooling, and compute management to unlock additional sellable capacity and enable more efficient, sustainable AI infrastructure. Ken’s approach to mission-critical infrastructure was shaped early in his career as a Marine Corps Special Operations officer, where he led the design, build, and deployment of data centers in remote, resource-constrained environments to support real-time operations. Prior to founding Bay Compute, Ken led national security initiatives at Hebbia, an applied-AI platform, and previously worked as a financial analyst. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Co-founder and CEO, Addis Energy
Michael Alexander is the Co-Founder and CEO of Addis Energy, a Boston-area startup using the earth as a chemical reactor to make ammonia. Addis Energy is developing a novel, net energy-positive pathway for ammonia synthesis to decouple ammonia production from natural gas supply, unlocking new production geographies to make ammonia production abundant and cost effective. Prior to founding Addis Energy, Michael built a decade-long career in the energy sector. He held key leadership roles at Marathon Petroleum Corporation, where he managed large-scale operations, optimized refinery processes, and implemented strategic workforce initiatives. Earlier in his career, he worked as a process engineer at Shell, specializing in financial analysis, emissions control, and capital project management. Michael earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, graduating with distinction, and holds a magna cum laude degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University where he was captain of the wrestling team.
Co-founder and CEO, Adaviv
Ian Seiferling (PhD, MSc.) is the CEO of AdaViv. With a background in biology and environmental science, Ian has worked extensively in domains such as plant science, urban agriculture, and climate adaptation. He has developed widely-used computer vision-based tools to measure and monitor the health of urban trees, and has led research on the spatially-explicit modeling of urban agriculture potential to feed urban populations. Ian's entrepreneurial and technological expertise enables him to bridge plant science, sensing, image processing, and data science in order to creatively put into practice cutting-edge methods that better understand crop plants. His research has been published in numerous high-impact academic journals, including Ecology, Conservation Ecology, and Nature Sustainability, and has been featured in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Guardian. Originally from the prairie grain belt provinces of Canada, Ian is passionate about using his skills to make a meaningful impact on the world.
Founder and CEO, Chronos AI
Marco Ganouna is the Founder & CEO of Chronos AI, a defense-tech company pioneering decentralized 3D location and communication networks that operate without GPS, cell towers, or the internet. With a track record of anticipating future market needs and building breakthrough technologies, Marco leads Chronos AI’s mission to redefine positioning, navigation, and communication for defense, public safety, and smart infrastructure worldwide.
Co-founder and CEO, Artificio
Arturo Deza is the Co-Founder & CEO of Artificio, a Self-Driving Car start-up that is working on a more computational & data efficient way to train self-driving cars, taking advantage of out-of-distribution data starting with emerging markets such as Latin America. Prior to running Artificio, Arturo was an Assistant Professor at UTEC in Lima, Peru; and prior to such appointment, he was a PostDoctoral Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (MIT-CBMM), and Harvard University’s Department of Psychology where his work focused on developing robust models of vision that are biologically inspired. He holds a PhD in Dynamical Neuroscience from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has a Bachelors in Robotics from Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria (UNI) in Lima, Peru. Arturo has published his scientific research at NeurIPS, CVPR & ICLR.
Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Principal, See to Solve LLC
Dr. Steve Spear, DBA, MS, MS, is a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the business process software firm See to Solve. Earlier in his career, he was a Research Associate at the University of Tokyo in the Yoshikawa–Tomiyama Laboratory and a Summer Intern at the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan. His work is at the intersection of innovation and operations with systems thinking and organizational learning, showing how organizations wire themselves for high-velocity learning and exceptional performance.
Spear’s books—Wiring the Winning Organization and The High-Velocity Edge—and his article “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” have received wide praise. The ideas in them have guided successful transformations across industries, including healthcare, biotechnology, engineering-intensive high tech, and defense.
His degrees are from Harvard (doctorate), MIT (master’s both in mechanical engineering and management), and Princeton (economics).
As early as the 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese firms revealed a striking competitive paradox. Their best wasn’t succeeding by making “the right tradeoffs” among quality, cost, features, and speed. Instead, they were delivering products of higher quality, with more variety, at lower cost, and at faster speed—while appearing to exert less effort. It was as if they were playing an entirely different game.
Close study revealed “the secret.” While much of the industrial world focused on optimizing the flow of materials through machines with fancy math, with people as an afterthought, the best created conditions in which people could solve hard problems, develop outstanding solutions, and deliver exceptional value to society. Everyone else was competing on brawn power; they were winning on brain power.
Amidst today’s turbulence—political realignments, economic disruptions, and rapid technological change—this approach to sustaining competitive advantage—seeing and solving problems better and faster than anyone else—is even more vital.
This talk explores how the best do this, by making problem solving easier to do, problems easier to solve, and problems easier to see earlier and more often, before they grow big. Examples will include both historical lessons from the pioneers and contemporary applications of these same principles.
John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT
Prof. Juejun (JJ) Hu is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2004 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009. Before returning to MIT, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware from 2010 to 2014. Prof. Hu’s research centers on integrated optics and photonics, with contributions spanning spectroscopy, imaging, and optical materials. His work has been recognized with honors, including the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, the Robert L. Coble Award from the American Ceramic Society, the Vittorio Gottardi Prize from the International Commission on Glass, the NSF CAREER Award, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award. He is a Fellow of international society for optics and photonics (SPIE), Optica, and the American Ceramic Society, and is the cofounder of three startups translating emerging photonics technologies from his laboratory into practice.
Infrared photons, though invisible to the human eye, are rapidly moving to the forefront of technology, enabling breakthroughs in how we sense, measure, and see the world. In my group, we are developing chip-scale photonic technologies that render the invisible visible, turning tiny chips into powerful tools for sensing and imaging.
On the sensing front, we are creating low-cost, high-performance photonic chips that harness a wide range of optical signatures in the infrared, including Raman scattering, absorption, and refractive index perturbations. These platforms bring laboratory-grade spectroscopy into compact and robust form factors, enabling real-time detection of trace chemicals across diverse industries. Several of these technologies have already moved beyond the laboratory: InSpek is advancing process control in pharmaceutical and agri-food sectors, Lightfinder Inc. is enabling continuous monitoring in energy and chemical industries, and other platforms are addressing urgent challenges such as the detection of heavy metal contamination in water.
In parallel, we are reshaping imaging optics at the chip scale. By transforming chips into flat optical elements, we can achieve performance once thought impossible with conventional lenses. A salient example is our flat fisheye lens, now commercialized by 2Pi Inc., which provides panoramic imaging in a wafer-thin form factor. Building on this foundation, we are extending the concept further, creating optical components that conform seamlessly to curved surfaces and developing active elements that reconfigure their functions on demand through tunable materials.
Together, these advances chart a vision where invisible photons become an accessible and ubiquitous resource. From real-time chemical monitoring to adaptive infrared imaging, chip-scale photonics offers a new sensory frontier — one that blends fundamental science with tangible societal impact.
Principal Research Scientist, MIT Microphotonics Center and Materials Research Laboratory
Dr. Anu Agarwal is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Microphotonics Center and Materials Research Laboratory. Her work has focused on the technologies for the foundational components of electronic-photonic chips, including polysilicon waveguides, LEDs, couplers, and photodetectors.
Dr. Agarwal has led several research projects at the Microphotonics Center/Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) at MIT since its inception. Her prior research includes the integration of active and passive optical components on silicon, using standard Si-CMOS fabrication processes. As a part of this research, she developed, evaluated, and later confirmed the utility of polycrystalline silicon material for waveguide applications. She also developed a design for a graded-index chip-to-fiber edge coupling scheme.
Although previous silicon microphotonic devices predominantly utilized the NIR range, the MIR regime is extremely interesting for hyperspectral imaging and chem-bio sensing because most chemical and biological toxins have their fingerprints in this range. Her work on MIR linear and nonlinear materials and devices is creating a planar, integrated, Si-CMOS-compatible microphotonics platform, which is enabling on-chip imaging and sensing applications.
As the leader of the LEAP at MIT.nano since January of 2018, she has and continues to (i) build a roadmap document of photonic sensors through the Integrated Photonic Systems Roadmap – International (IPSR-I), by identifying technology gaps in materials, components and systems for photonic sensors, and (ii) enable education and workforce development in integrated photonics across the talent pipeline from K to Gray.
As the director of Electronic-Photonic Packaging (EPP) at MIT’s Microphotonics Center, she is exploring innovative photonic testing and packaging solutions. In this role, Anu is currently pioneering a program for microchip manufacturing and operation that is establishing a path towards resource efficiency across technology, value chain innovation, and workforce.
Anu was named a 2022 Optica Fellow with over 250 journal and refereed conference publications, 21 awarded patents, and 1 pending patent. Prior to coming to MIT, she received her doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University, where she investigated the spatial extent of point defect interactions in silicon. With Dr. Agarwal’s cross-disciplinary training in Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Materials Science, and industrial experience, she has successfully connected basic sciences with relevant applications, using integrated devices that are manufacturable on a large scale.
Energy consumption is at an all-time high in data centers. Enhanced microchip functionality for next-generation applications, such as AI, 6G, LiDAR etc., can no longer depend solely on shrinking the dimensions of a transistor. The semiconductor package is the 21st-century transistor, and this must be scaled to obtain high-performance systems.
Generative-AI (Gen-AI) models require massive and rapid data movement between thousands of interconnected processors (GPUs/XPUs) and memory systems. Traditional electrical interconnects, which rely on long traces on a circuit board and power-hungry pluggable optical modules, have reached their physical and energy limits. The electrical signals degrade over distance, requiring additional components like digital signal processors (DSPs) and retimers, which consume significant power and add latency.
Co-packaged optics (CPO) is essential for this recent Gen-AI-driven revolution because it directly addresses the critical bottlenecks of power consumption, bandwidth density, and latency that are crippling traditional data center architectures. CPO overcomes these limitations by integrating optical engines directly onto the same package as the processing chip (ASIC). This dramatically shortens the electrical path from centimeters to mere millimeters, allowing data to be converted to light and transmitted much more efficiently.
Through FUTUR-IC, a global research alliance, we are enabling CPO within microchip systems, with high-performance, passively assembled chip-to-chip and chip-to-fiber couplers which employ graded-index and evanescent structures, fabricated using standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor foundry processes.
The urgency to align microchip system performance scaling with a commercially viable manufacturing value chain dominates business and technology decisions today, as the solutions are expected to power the next 40 years of progress for the semiconductor industry.
Associate Professor, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Kevin Chen is an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, USA. He received his PhD in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University in 2017 and his bachelor’s degree in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 2012. His research interests include high-bandwidth soft actuators, microrobotics, and aerial robotics. He is a recipient of the Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, the Steven Vogel Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, multiple best paper awards (TRO 21, RAL 20, IROS 15), and the Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Excellence Award.
Flapping-wing flight at the insect scale is incredibly challenging. Insect muscles not only power flight but also absorb in-flight collisional impact, making these tiny flyers simultaneously agile and robust. In contrast, existing aerial robots have not demonstrated these properties. Rigid robots are fragile against collisions, while soft-driven systems suffer from limited speed, precision, and controllability. In this talk, I will describe our effort in developing a new class of bio-inspired micro-flyers, ones that are powered by high bandwidth soft actuators and equipped with rigid appendages. We constructed the first heavier-than-air aerial robot powered by soft artificial muscles, which can demonstrate a 1000-second hovering flight. In addition, our robot can recover from in-flight collisions and perform somersaults within 0.10 seconds. This work demonstrates for the first time that soft aerial robots can achieve agile and robust flight capabilities absent in rigid-powered micro-aerial vehicles, thus showing the potential of a new class of hybrid soft-rigid robots. I will also discuss our recent progress in incorporating onboard sensors, electronics, and batteries.